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I’m really excited to announce a 5-page feature spread on my #transhumanism work and Libertarian Governor campaign in today’s Times of London Magazine, one of England’s oldest and largest papers. There’s a paywall for digital but I think you can get two articles free without registering. If you have access to the print, it’s in the magazine:


Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of California with two signature policies. First, he’ll eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee $5,000 (£3,800) per month for every Californian household for ever. (He’ll do this without raising taxes a dime, he promises.) The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies – robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on – in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.

“What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades,” he…

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SpaceX fans are extremely curious about a new robot that keeps appearing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You.” Some are calling it the “Roomba” robot while others insist it should be called “Optimus Prime.” There are theories as to what this robot is for, but there’s no confirmation from SpaceX itself, yet.

We reached out to SpaceX for more details about this mysterious robot, but it was unable to give us any information. However, we can tell you that SpaceX only refers to the machine as a robot and does not assign it any other name (like Roomba or Optimus Prime).

For this video, we connected with some of SpaceX’s fans. Photos shown in the video were taken by Julia Bergeron (@julia_bergeron) and David Akin, University of Maryland.

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China today announced plans to become the global leader in AI research and development. It will increase government spending on core AI programs to $22 billion in the next few years, with plans to spend nearly $60 billion per year by 2025.

The announcement sends a clear message: this is the age of artificial intelligence. Reuters reports the Chinese government will soon put forth AI regulations in areas concerning safety, implementation, and control. The US issued a similar statement last year in a White House review of the future of AI.

The US and China lead the field in both private-sector and government spending on machine-learning, though experts have said China’s deep-learning programs have over-taken US-led research in scope and volume.

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If you’re at FreedomFest today, please come to the 2:30PM panel on AI I’m on (Vendome C). I’ll be partially discussing my Federal Land Dividend (#Libertarian #basicincome plan).Great line-up of panelists: Michael Shermer, Peter Voss, Edward Hudgins, Gennady Stolyarov, & Eric Shuss.

Of speaker https://freedomfest2017.sched.com/event/AzET/eric-shuss-ed-h…ee-markets #transhumanism


View more about this event at FreedomFest 2017.

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It’s a technology looking for a new mission.

The technology is solar electric propulsion (SEP), which NASA has identified in recent years as a key enabler for eventual human missions to Mars. SEP, the agency argued, could be used to propel cargo missions to Mars in advance of crewed missions much more efficiently than conventional chemical propulsion systems.

High-power SEP was to be tested in interplanetary space on the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), powering the robotic spacecraft that would travel to a near Earth asteroid, grab a boulder off its surface, and fly back to cislunar space. However, NASA announced earlier this year it planned to cancel ARM, and Congress, never much of a fan of the mission, has shown no signs of opposing it.

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Government finance will lead the way in AI research, including the development of supercomputers, and high performance semiconductor chips, software and the hiring of key talent to lead the field, China’s science and technology minister Wan Gang said in March during the country’s parliamentary meeting.


The Chinese government’s July 8 plan aims to keep pace with AI technology by 2020, make major breakthroughs by 2025, and lead the world in AI by 2030.

PUBLISHED : Friday, 21 July, 2017, 1:28pm.

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In our last film, we explored how the introduction of autonomous, self-driving cars is likely to kill a lot of jobs. Many millions of jobs, in fact. But is it short sighted to view self-driving vehicles as economic murderers? Is it possible that we got it totally wrong, and automated vehicles won’t be Grim Reapers — but rather the biggest job creators since the internet?

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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